Good Year Thus Far . . .

Above is me in Boston, at ye gates adjacent to Harvard. My friends Maryanne and Greg took me on a three-week tour of New England and New York, and those were the moft magical three weeks of my life, never surpass'd. To be a Lovecraftian on his first visit to Lovecraft Country--Great Yuggoth, what an experience! I've been musing about Boston because I am preparing to begin work on a second collection of Enoch Coffin stories, and I want the first tale to be set in Boston. My memory of ye city is now so poor, however, that I fear making a lot of mistakes in describing it, &c. Well, I write fantasy fiction, so I guess it's semi-okay if ye Boston I evoke is more phantasy than reality.

With this second collection of Enoch Coffin tales, I am going to evoke the spirit of Poe rather than Lovecraft--at least that's my intention. Poe had a bit of an attitude regarding some of Boston's authors, but ye city seems to have embrac'd ye poet, as ye pictur'd statue of Poe and his Raven has been erected near ye Boston Commons. It's such a cool-looking thing that I feel an intense ache to travel to Boston so as to kneel before it and recite some snatches of "Ulalume". 

Anyway, the writing, for some reason, is flowing. It's not something I can ever plan on, to become suddenly productive. My great shame as an author is that I am so lacking in discipline, that I can only write "when in the mood". As I age, the mood to write becomes more rare. But of late, things have been moft encouraging. This morning, a friend accepted the story I have been slaving away on this month, "The Barrier Between". My friend's anthology has as its theme "nightmares and dreams," and that immediately made me think of Lovecraft, one of ye world's Great Dreamers. I was able to fight my initial Lovecraftian urge, however, and began to devise a story that was in no way Lovecraftian. Hopefully this isn't a false start. I want--I need--to write.

So ye rest of this evening will be devoted to musing on Poe, on dipping into some few biographies retelling his life story, and in listening to some of his poetry on audio cassette. I want to drink Poe's aura, and then part my lips and spill, as ink, Poe's haunting of my soul.